


Rosie

by twistedchick



Series: Identity [4]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Kidfic, M/M, carpentry, non-con recovery, police work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-03 00:17:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim doesn't think he can help Blair deal with the memories of what he's endured.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rosie

I never thought I'd have anything in common with Jackson Brown's music. I'm a Santana man, I like Latino rhythms and sounds, things like Black Magic Woman. Jackson Brown's stuff has some rhythm, sure, but it's too undefined for me. The guitar chords all sound the same and the words don't do a thing.

But that's changed.

Every once in a while, Brown (Henri, not Jackson) goes on an oldies kick, and even though he has the headphones on I can still hear the sounds leaking out in the tiny gaps between the ear padding and his head. And this day he was playing the tape of Running On Empty, for no reason I could figure out.

It's okay music. It doesn't annoy me, not like elevator music or the greatest-hits-of-the-sixties stuff on radio that never plays the songs I remember. But I hate like hell when it starts acting like background theme music for my life.

I was waiting for Sandburg to get back from an errand he said he had to run after lunch, filling in time by reviewing open cases and fiddling with paperwork. Regardless of what he says, he really doesn't do all of it for me. Some of it's confidential enough that I have to do it myself even when I'd rather shove it off on anyone I could find. I mean, I can't help it that my fingertips are bigger than the computer keys and I get more typos per line than anyone else in the bullpen, even Brown with his headphones on at full blast as he types.

Anyway, Brown's tape reeled through the long first song, 'Running on Empty,' which was pretty much how I'd felt the past week or two. We'd had nothing but stakeouts and busts, good busts but energetic ones, the kind that mean I'm running through buildings and across parking lots and tackling suspects that don't have the sense to hold still when you tell them to. I'd had too many long hours, not enough sleep, not enough time to think, and I was at the point of reacting to everything with whatever my body told me to do first and considering the consequences later on.

In other words, everything was normal, or as normal as it gets for me.

And then Sandburg came in and stopped off at Rafe's desk for a couple of minutes, talking quietly.

I didn't notice it that much, except to note that he was present, because I'd actually started to listen to another song on H's tape, 'Rosie,' the one about the sound man who gives the pretty groupie a free pass to the concert, only to have her run off with the drummer afterward.

Then I saw it, the closeness between Rafe and my partner, the quiet humor going on at the other desk, the sense that more was happening than I realized. Rafe smiled at Sandburg, that little smile he gets when he feels confident enough to let himself relax with an equal. It's hard to be the youngest and newest in a bullpen, even one as friendly as ours, and Sandburg was one of the first to say hello to him when he arrived and get him up to speed on open cases and on the things that you need to know when you work with new people.

But Blair's smile in return was one I'd only seen before when he aimed it at me. It wasn't one of his general-interest smiles, or one of those charm-the-ladies million-watt blasts. It was the shy one, the one that means something important is happening.

And it wasn't aimed at me. It was aimed at Rafe.

Bam.

Without a second's warning I knew where that sound man was coming from, and it hurt.

I turned back to the case files, and Sandburg came over to my desk in a few minutes. He set two cups of take-out coffee from Irene's on the desk carefully, dropped his backpack on the floor out of the way, opened his cup, and said, "Here. I figured you'd need it by now. Anything new on the Methuen case?"

He was right about the coffee, and I was glad that he'd stopped at Irene's instead of at the break room. "Not really. I've got a feeling there's a tie-in among that one and the Ashwood and Lester cases, but I can't quite pull it together."

Sandburg pulled up a chair, took a drink of his coffee, and said, "Tell me about it. Maybe I can put together a pattern."

So I did, and we went through the whole thing again, and after an hour we found the missing link and went in to tell Simon, who was pleased as hell about it and told us to follow up on it first thing tomorrow, as it was too late in the day to contact the relevant individuals. Sandburg and I smiled at each other, split up the responsibility for the next day's work with Simon's blessing, and headed home.

And all the rest of the evening, and on into the night, I couldn't forget that song, couldn't stop seeing Sandburg with Rafe, trying not to imagine more. I didn't say anything about the conversation I'd witnessed. Part of it was that I didn't want to intrude; Sandburg has little enough privacy as my partner and housemate. Part of it was that I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer.

I couldn't stop wanting Sandburg, my partner, to turn back into Blair, my friend.

He'd been my partner and my guide and my friend before the Academy, and now he was my partner and my guide, and still my friend but a more distant kind of friend. The closeness had slipped away, and I didn't know why or what to do to get it back.

And, late at night, after he'd gone to bed in the little room downstairs, all I could think of was that my Rosie didn't wear a ring, but that sure was my thing, all right, and when I turned out the last light in the loft, I was handing it to me, damn it, instead of to someone else that I cared about the way I cared about continuing to breathe.

In particular, to the someone who was snoring faintly one floor below me, who probably hadn't a clue how I felt.

Jim Ellison, the Great Stone Face.

Maybe what you looked like really mattered more, now. God knows, Rafe's a handsome man, one whose expressions can be read a lot more easily than mine.

But Sandburg knows me, knows who I am. Hell, he's known me for nearly five years now, longer than I was involved with Carolyn from the time I met her until she moved to San Francisco. That's as long as I was in the Rangers, longer than I was in Peru, longer than any other major relationship of my life except my working with Simon, which wasn't exactly the same thing since we've always had rank to consider as well as friendship.

And still -

And still -

I couldn't stop seeing Sandburg smiling at Rafe, and turning into Blair.

I'd thought I was the only person on earth, other than Naomi, maybe, who'd ever seen that shy, hopeful Blair. He'd never seemed to appear to anyone else.

Until now.

***

It was worse on Friday night.

Sandburg had a date with Corinne, the new assistant in Technical Services. He cooked and ate a fast Mexican dinner with me, then left in a cloud of dust to take her to the new Julia Roberts movie. I should've gotten a date myself. I could have, if I'd been thinking, but this whole Rafe thing had blown up in my face and I didn't know what to think. I hadn't even had the brains to call Simon to see if he wanted to shoot pool.

Why would Sandburg have turned into Blair for Rafe, when he wouldn't do it for me any more?

Who was taking out Corinne, anyway? Sandburg, my efficient, professional, compassionate partner, or Blair, the great hit-and-run lover of our time? And if he was going out with Corinne on Friday, who was he going out with on Saturday?

Maybe I was reading too much into one look, one exchange of glances.

Maybe not.

Maybe I just needed to get a life, I told myself at 2 a.m., when I finally decided to hell with it and headed upstairs to bed. Whoever either Sandburg or Blair slept with wasn't my business.

***

I flipped over the omelette and pushed it around the hot pan a little. "How was your date with Corinne last night, Chief?"

"Mmmmokay," Sandburg yawned. "Nothing impressive, but fun. She used to be in film studies before she went into technical, and man, she can sure cut a movie apart. Lighting, sound, camera angles. It was like sitting in on a seminar." He grinned, pushing his hair back from his face as the grin turned into another yawn. "But fun."

"You mean there's someone in the world who talks more than you do?" I teased, and handed him his omelette with veggies, cooked solid the way he liked.

He nodded. "Hard to believe?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. I've seen you meditate for an hour sometimes, and not say a word." I set up my own omelette, with kielbasa, and started it cooking. "You going to see her again tonight?"

"No, man, I couldn't go through that two days in a row." He gulped half of his orange juice and dug back into the eggs again. "Rafe and I are going to go to that new dance club over on Glenview, the Glass Onion. They've got some good bands playing there on Saturdays."

I didn't know that one, but I knew the neighborhood. It sat between university, industrial and professional zones, and was neutral ground to all of them. "When did it open?"

"Couple of weeks ago. I've heard good things about it from a lot of people."

I nodded. "Sounds like a good place to pick up a date. You like to dance."

"Yeah." He was scanning the newspaper, reading the comics quickly, checking out the top stories to make sure nothing had come up on any cases we were working. "Unless Simon calls, you should get a good day off. What're you going to do?"

"I don't know," I said honestly. "Putter around, maybe go check out some stuff at the hardware store."

"Sounds like a plan," he said, yawning again, an ordinary everyday tired-Chief yawn. "I'm going bookstore-hopping; I want to see what's out there in the stacks." He yawned again, and shook his head as if to clear fog from his brain. "I'll be glad when life slows down a little. It gets to be a bit much, you know?"

"Yeah." I hesitated. "You could hang out with me tonight if you want. It might be quieter than going to the club."

"Ehnnn, well, I haven't been out clubbing since I got back into Major Crime, and I've kind of been looking forward to it." He gazed at me, and I could feel the obfuscation sliding out into the light. "You know, I used to go out a lot when I was a student, and it's one of the places where nobody cares what I am, a cop or an anthropologist. I think I need that sometimes."

He had a point, I had to admit. "We all need that sometimes, Chief. Have a good time."

Still Sandburg, he waved me off toward the hardware store as he mumbled over the sports section.

***

I missed Blair. It was as simple as that.

Police training is supposed to toughen you, give you skills so that you can deal with the street productively. It isn't supposed to be a full-mindfuck makeover like the military, though my mind was already so fucked up when I went into the Army that they didn't have to do much to break it apart, and they did better at putting it together than I would have on my own. I could almost say the Army saved my life, back then, though it took it out of me in payback until I resigned from the Rangers.

But that's the Army, and the Rangers, not the state Police Academy course that Sandburg had taken, and passed with flying colors. On the surface, it had polished his skills and given him a little better physical conditioning and greater knowledge of how to do police work. Underneath, maybe it had done too much.

The young guy who'd been interested in every subject - and knew something about all of them as well - wasn't there any more for me. Now I had a competent, friendly professional for a partner, someone I could rely on to back me up with authority and ability, not a half-trained teaching associate who could talk his way out of anything and felt uncomfortable around firearms. The old Blair Sandburg would only pick up a weapon when I asked him to hold it on someone. The new model was very close to being a crack shot, apparently because he was farsighted and wore reading glasses so sighting down the barrel at something in the distance was easy.

Maybe he was just growing up.

Maybe I was just growing old and boring. Hell, I'd been boring for years and he'd thought I was fascinating; what was the difference now? Had I changed that much?

***

When I was between pine boards and cedar paneling at the hardware store, checking out the curly grain in natural mahogany shelving and trying to calculate the board feet for what I wanted to do, I realized it was both of us changing, not just one of us.

I wasn't working with Blair Sandburg any more. I was working with Detective B.J. Sandburg, armed, authorized and sworn to back me up as a detective, not as an unarmed observer. And I could trace that change to his first case, that one where he went undercover as a street kid, as bait for a drug-and-kiddie-porn ring, and nearly didn't get out in one piece mentally or physically.

By the time I'd gotten there, he'd been drugged and used, not ungently but thoroughly, and was curled up whimpering in the bedsheets, cold and abandoned. But he latched onto the front of my old wool jacket and refused to let go, and I gathered him up in my arms in the sheets and took him to the hospital. Rafe brought his clothes, with the evidence he'd managed to hide in them even while drugged, and Simon and I stayed with him constantly until the drugs had been swept from his system.

I'd been so afraid of losing him, of having him come out from all this and be someone else, but that didn't happen. Blessedly, the DA's office got a guilty plea without a full-scale trial, which relieved Blair of having to testify in public to what had been done to him. Simon watched the tapes that were used as evidence, the ones that showed a drugged Sandburg being used and abused; this was Simon's way of making himself endure what had happened to someone he felt guilty about sending out on the street. Simon still saw his newest detective as a kid a few years older than his son, Darryl, though Sandburg's experience was far wider and more worldly wise from the start. I know Simon; he doesn't want to ask people to do something for him that he couldn't or wouldn't do himself; that's part of what makes him a good captain. But when Simon came out of the private viewing room he looked gray and decades older, pale under his dark skin. All he said was, "I'm not letting you see this, so don't ask."

I didn't ask. I didn't need to know. What I did need to know, Blair would tell me, and we'd go to counseling together and deal with it. We'd agreed on this before he went on the street.

Maybe B.J. Sandburg associated working with me too much with what he recalls of that closed room and the movie camera running just out of sight. Maybe that's what's hid Blair from my sight.

Or maybe he's processing more of the things that happened to him six months ago. He's well on his way to becoming a seasoned detective now, with street smarts and ability to burn.

Some things haven't changed. I still think - no, I know - I have the finest partner, the best friend, the most brilliant and interesting man in the world living under my roof with me.

Even when he's out with someone else.

***

Maybe I was confusing survival with finding ways to keep love alive.

Maybe I just have bad timing. It wouldn't be the first time for that. I've had bad timing all my life. Just ask my ex-wife.

I've been sitting on these feelings for so long. I couldn't say anything for a long time because I felt that I'd be putting him into an awkward, horrible position that would compromise his research. Then he drowned, and I couldn't say anything after that because it would seem like payback; you've survived, so here, I'll be your lover. Then he gave up the dissertation, and it would've looked like a guilt-ridden payoff to even suggest a physical relationship, let alone hint at the emotions I'd kept under lock and key for so long. At least, that's how I felt at the time; he made it clear that he was just changing paths, and not entirely for my sake.

Now that he's my official partner, it's still lock-and-key time. Don't ask, don't tell.

Official regulations say that you don't 'fraternize' with your partner, or with someone of too different a rank; it's defined as sexual harassment under the law, particularly within a department or between superior and inferior officers' positions. Simon can't date Megan, or, if he wished to, anyone else in Major Crime; Megan can't get involved with Brown, not that she'd like to, and Blair shouldn't get involved with Rafe. They're equals now in rank, or close enough.

And because we're official partners now, full-time, I'm forbidden to have a sexual relationship with him on my own time because of how it might spill over into the work arena. That wasn't as much of a concern when he was an unofficial observer; it was nobody's business then, and half the station probably thought we warmed each other's sheets nightly. We didn't. It wasn't their business, anyway.

It wasn't that I didn't want him. Or that he didn't feel something for me, I'm pretty sure. But he's a polite guy, under that pushy exterior. Toward the end of the time when he was an observer, he was starting to feel guilty about how much he thought he'd intruded into my life, and he didn't ask as many questions even though he wanted to. And I backed off a bit, too, when he wanted to go into what he saw as the mystical side of the Sentinel-Shaman connection; I wasn't sure I wanted to go there, and he respected that. We talked about it, but words didn't solve anything except to make me feel an invisible wall of reticence rising between us, like plexiglass, clear and impermeable, the edges shifting so I couldn't get over it or around it. And I didn't want to blast through it in case he'd be hurt; he'd been hurt enough by then, too much of it by me.

Oh, I wanted him more than words could say, wanted to make my best friend into my lover in a way that went beyond all spoken or written language.

That was the problem. That, and timing.

And now, unless there's a shift in the official regs that I don't see happening, or unless he opens a door in that plexiglass wall, I'll just wait. There's too much at stake. Regardless of what he says, Blair changed his entire life for me, and I won't do anything that will make him lose the new one he's built with so much effort.

I'll hang out with Sandburg, go to Jags games and camping and wherever else we go. I might go out with Johanna or Trudy or Silvie, the woman from the County Clerk's office who put aside all her work to dig through the land records for me when I needed to trace ownership of a tricky piece of property last month. I might even go down to a club like Fortunes, the gay bar down on Liberty Street, and watch the crowd for someone with long curly dark hair and a shy smile, even if I never do more than watch the crowd.

I can manage. It's just another covert op, hiding who I am and letting the cover stay on. I can manage with that for a while, observing and waiting for an opening.

***

He got in at 5 a.m. Sunday, smelling of smoke and traces of women's perfume, moving in a loose, boneless way toward his room. I didn't smell anything else on him, but he's considerate; in the past, when he's come back from a night out and thought the smells would bother me, he'd take a shower before he came home. I don't get the sense that he did it this time; I'm not noticing any different shampoo, and I know he didn't pack any of it with him when he went out.

You couldn't fit even a travel packet into the pocket of those jeans. You couldn't fit much more than a very few dollar bills into the back pocket, and a house key into the front. If that.

Great. I'm spying on my roommate, acting like a jealous lover, which I've got no right to do. Get a life, Ellison, your own and not his.

Rosie, you're all right, but damn it, you're not him.

***

"I guess I just don't understand some American music, Henri."

It was too early on Monday morning for a philosophical discussion, but Simon wasn't here yet so I figured it was worth getting in on. Sandburg was down in Records charming Grace into pulling the files we wanted now instead of dropping the request into the queue for later, so I picked up my empty mug and headed toward the conversation on the way to the break room.

"How's that, Conner?" Brown was sitting at his desk, picking out his theme music of the day for his headphones. How he can type reports while listening to music is something I've never figured out, but he does a decent job of it.

Megan frowned at the tape she held, the Jackson Brown one from the past Thursday. "All right. I get the theme album thing, the band on the road. But in that third song, the guy treats his girlfriend something awful. There she is at home, and he's out trying to pick up groupies?" She shook her head. "I just don't like it."

I couldn't help it. I snickered.

Megan turned, a slight frown creasing her forehead. Rafe, at the next desk, snorted his coffee over the top of a report he'd just painstakingly typed. Brown shook his head, handed Rafe a fistful of tissues from a box in his desk, and looked up at Megan with a bland, innocent face.

"Rosie's not his girlfriend." Brown gazed up at her and played with the Academy ring he wore on his right hand.

Megan blushed. She dropped the tape, strode to her desk, sat down, and buried herself in a report on a case she and Rafe were investigating. Rafe, for his part, was shaking his head over the ruined report and starting to type up another one. Brown and I caught each other's glances and neither of us could stop laughing. Megan cast a cold blue eye over both of us, and went back to reading. She knew it was nothing personal; we'd laugh like that at anyone in the bullpen, and we respect her work. But it was all a bit too much for her the first thing on Monday.

Simon breezed in through the door. "Here, here, don't you people have some cases to investigate? Looks like Conner's the only one doing any work at all." He blasted through into his office, and Brown and I exchanged one last snort before I went back to my desk. With Simon back, I'd have a good chance to get some of his special roast coffee, which beats out the break room sludge any day.

When Sandburg came in with a stack of files half an hour later, I was in Simon's office figuring out how we were going to handle the takedown of a white-collar slimeball who thought his position as an executive made him immune to laws concerning bribery, blackmail and corruption. I didn't look up to see if he'd smiled at Rafe on the day after they'd gone out together.

***

Sandburg's brilliant at finding connections between cases and suspects. I couldn't believe we'd wrapped up two cases on Monday and brought in the suspects for booking. The first was a simple drug bust that we wrapped up in the morning, with the report done before lunch. The second involved the executive slimeball who'd been given the choice of turning himself in or being arrested publicly; he'd decided to tough it out, so we had to interrupt a board meeting at his company to bring him in. We hadn't alerted the media, but Simon had thought that if the guy wanted to play rough and look stupid we shouldn't abridge his constitutional right to do it, so we politely interrupted his company's annual report and arrested him in front of his colleagues, several of whom were involved in his private dealings, and then brought in the colleagues too. It was a good bust, and Simon told us to go home an hour early and get the report in on Tuesday. So I called Margarita Diaz to see if she wanted a babysitter a little early.

I've been taking care of Francesca Diaz for her grandmother once a week or so for the past eight months, since Francesca was orphaned and moved to Cascade. She was shy at first, but she's opened up a lot since her English improved. It feels so good, after a day of dealing with slimy lawbreakers, to have someone to look at and talk with who knows nothing of that kind of evil, who only thinks I'm someone she can climb on and play with who will take care of her.

It was raining a lot, and even though 'Ceska likes to splash in puddles in her red rubber boots we just went around the corner from her grandmother's bakery to the loft, so she could play up there in front of the fireplace and I could read to her from one of the books Margarita packed for her. Margarita's glad of the break; she can get her errands done more easily sometimes without the little one, and she knows 'Ceska is safe with us. She's a proud woman; she repays us in fresh bread and rolls, whatever just came out of the oven at the bakery.

Sandburg was already at the loft, making a pot of tea for himself and hot chocolate with a little cinnamon for 'Ceska. She ran over to him when she came in, and he helped her off with her jacket and hung it up, and then picked her up for a big hug. When they rubbed noses and giggled, I knew I had Blair back again for a while, and I could feel my stomach muscles relaxing. They'd been tight ever since we'd gone into the board room.

I said earlier that I'd thought only Naomi and I had seen Blair; I was leaving out children. He's always Blair with children, just not with adults. He's more cautious now, more careful of himself.

But not with her. She grabbed at his hair, which he'd kept shorter since the Academy, and pulled gently at the curls on top to make them spring out in wild directions.

"Too short," she told him, and he tugged gently on her long black hair.

"Can I have some of yours until mine grows back?"

She shook her head. "B'air - "

"What, sweetheart?" He'd put her down to sit on the counter while he poured a mug of cocoa for her from the small pot. She had her own mug, with an owl on it, one he'd gotten in Mexico years ago and set aside for her use.

"I 'ike you a lot. Wi' you marry me?" She still had trouble pronouncing her 'L's. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. I unpacked her books and took them over to the big chair in front of the fireplace, where she liked to sit on my lap as I read to her.

Blair handed me a cup of tea, not too strong, and smiled back at her. "I like you, too, 'Ceska. An awful, awful lot." He pushed her hair out of her face so it wouldn't get into her mug. "But I think you've got to grow up a bit first."

"Okay." She nodded and drank a little cocoa. "When I grow up?"

That child will be devastating in about a decade, when she realizes how beautiful she is. Right now, she's just incredibly cute. "The Chief's like Peter Pan - he'll never grow up." I said.

Blair smiled at me. I melted inside. He didn't notice.

"I'll tell you what, sweetheart." He had that earnest face on that had charmed his way through all the available women in the Cascade PD at least once each. "When you're grown up, if I'm not married, and if you still want me, you can have me. Is that okay with you?"

Francesca nodded solemnly and smiled back at him. He put her down on the floor and she went over to the fireplace to play for a few minutes, until I'd come to sit in the big chair and read to her. This time she wanted Beauty and the Beast, and I got to try to do all the voices for her. She put her head on my chest to listen when I made my voice drop and rumble as the Beast, and it made her laugh.

"You're a good Beast," she told me. I ignored the snort from the couch, where Blair was supposedly reading a novel he'd picked up secondhand on Saturday. "Will you always come and rescue me from the wo'ves?"

I hugged her. "Yes, Francesca. I'll always come and rescue you from the wolves."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

We fed her supper, a grilled cheese sandwich and an apple that Blair sliced so thin for her that she could almost see through it, and I watched my partner be his gentlest self for more than two hours, telling a four-year-old a string of stories he'd learned in Central America and teaching her to play checkers until Margarita came to pick up her granddaughter and drop off a loaf of the special herb bread she'd been trying as an addition to the bakery.

It had been a good day, a good day of police work and a good evening, and after they were gone he started to tell me about this idea he had for research. Not another formal study or dissertation, but just something he was observing about how different departments in the police interacted and comparing that with stratified tribal societies. It was interesting, and it made sense, and I lay back and watched him and just relaxed with the happiness of having the person I loved most being himself for a while. I reached out to tousle his hair, the way I used to do all the time when it was longer, and he stilled, almost imperceptibly, when I touched him, so I made it faster and more casual than I wanted and he was all right again, but the guards were up, the gate was closed and the clear barrier was down again.

The only time that seems too short is the time that we get to play.

***

I waited until Sandburg had gone for coffee before I picked up the phone, and when she said she could see me I told Simon I would be downstairs on Third for an hour or so and would be back. He waved me away with one hand as he reached for the ringing phone with the other, and I got out of there.

"I didn't expect to see you again so soon, Detective," Dr. Whelan said. "Have you shot someone I haven't been told about?"

Maida Whelan is one of the three department psychologists; Blair and I had been to see her after his undercover case, and I'd liked her enough to come see her once or twice to help me sort out some minor things I was working through. She's in her fifties, sympathetic, helpful and unsentimental, and a lot easier for me to talk with than the younger Ph.D.'s who have all the learning and none of the experience.

"Nobody yet, but it's early in the day," I replied, and she smiled as I sat down. "This is about my partner."

"Ah, Detective Sandburg. What's on your mind?"

I knew I couldn't say it all; I could not allow myself to come clean about all my feelings. But I could at least tell her what I'd noticed of the plexiglass wall, and the guards, the times when he was open and the rest of the time when he wasn't.

She listened, watching me talk, saying nothing. When I'd finished, she said, "You know yourself, from your time in Narcotics and Vice, that action on the street changes people. Your partner's been working with you for four years, but he's only been a detective for a few months. He's still adjusting to it; he will be for the next year. It's very possible that part of this adjustment includes recovering from the difficulties of his first case. I realize that nobody else would have been suitable for that job, but that doesn't mean he was ready for it, either. He has come in and done the inner work, and benefited by it, I think we both know that."

"Is there anything I can do to help him?"

Maida let out a deep breath slowly. "From what you tell me, his work is not affected by this, so far. My files are confidential, and will remain so. I will write my report to show that you came to see me today with some concerns about your partner's wellbeing, and that we've resolved what can be resolved." She put her pen down on the desk and looked up at me. "Why don't you tell me the real reason you're here, Detective?"

"Because I'm not here as a detective, just as a man," I said slowly. Maida nodded, watching me. "You're right, I'm withholding evidence. I didn't want my emotions part of the official record."

"I understand." She let her face soften a little. "If it helps any, I think I know a good deal of what your evidence might be; I noticed when you were here before. Since that was not department business, it stayed out of my official report." Her head went a little to one side. "I don't suppose you're going to tell me things have changed, are you?"

I shook my head. "I don't think they could change."

"And he doesn't know."

I shrugged helplessly. "It's hard to tell. I can't do anything when those walls are up, can I? He's always been better at reading me than I am at reading him."

"Let me suggest this for thought, Jim. For several years Blair's job was to be your assistant, your helper. He was your partner in your eyes, but to the rest of the department he was a tag-along, regardless of how well he did and how he helped you. Now he's a fully qualified detective, as well as your partner. He's their equal and yours. Is it possible that this is affecting your relationship?"

It was possible. It was more than likely. I sat back in the chair in Maida's office and wondered how long I'd been this blind and whether she'd have to prescribe glasses or a seeing-eye dog, and how well the dog would fit into the truck.

Maida smiled, a little more relaxed. "Jim, your life has been a roller coaster for years. Now you've got someone else doing the driving as well, choosing which loop-the-loop to go on. Give the partnership some time to settle out. As for your own emotions, it's not good for you to hold them in so tightly, either. If you can find a way to let them out a little, to let yourself feel them in a safe way, it would be very good for you." She leaned forward. "I know there are constraints here that neither of us is mentioning, because of who you are and where we are. Just because the law prohibits acting on prejudices doesn't mean everyone in the department is tolerant of what they don't understand; we both know that. But I want you to know that if you need to talk with me, any time, just call, including off hours."

She scribbled a number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. "Your assignment, should you choose to accept it," she said with the merest twinkle, "is to find a way to express your emotions that you consider safe and appropriate. And no, you don't have to write about it or report back, all right?"

"This card won't self-destruct in five seconds will it?" I asked her, with a grateful smile.

***

One good thing about having a home the size of the loft is that there's enough empty space for me to work in when I decide to do something. Actually, I shouldn't even worry about space; I own the building, and there's lots of basement besides the storage space that comes with other people's apartments. But when it comes to using expensive equipment, I prefer to have it upstairs under lock and key where I can keep an eye on it.

I had the newspapers down and the sawhorses up and the boards in place when Sandburg came in with the groceries. His eyes went wide as he dropped the bags on the kitchen island. "Do I believe my eyes? Who are you and what have you done with the guy with the house rules?"

"They're still in place, Chief. Just felt like making something, for a change," I said. "You knew I did carpentry, didn't you?"

"Yeah, sort of. I guess I did."

"I redid the cabinets when I bought the place, and fixed the shelves and cabinets in a couple other apartments between renters, too, but that was a while back." The building didn't need a lot of maintenance; I had a plumber on contract to take care of the pipes, and an electrician for wiring and such, but I'd always done the woodworking myself.

He nodded to himself, fitting the pieces together: Jim, building, circular saw, boards, sawhorses, other assorted tools. "So, what're you going to make?"

I shrugged. "For now, a mess and some noise." I handed him the aviation-level ear protectors, full-coverage with extra padding. "These should keep it down to a dull roar, and I'll dial down to deal with the rest of it."

"Yeah. Looks that way. Man, these are the ones the airport ground crew wear. When did you get them?"

I shifted a stack of boards from one arm to the other, seeking the right place to put them. They'd warp if left upright too long; maybe on the floor in the corner here, where we wouldn't trip over them? "Years ago; found them in the basement when I was getting out the equipment."

"So, what're you going to build, Jim? Do you need any help?" He wasn't quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but it was a closer approximation than I'd seen for a while.

I shook my head. "Thanks but no thanks, Chief. This is my relaxation project, not ours, okay? It'll give me something to do when you're out at the clubs."

He took this in, and his expression veered toward confused and maybe hurt before it headed back into acceptance - of what, I wasn't certain. "Okay. You realize I'm not going out tonight or for a few days. My social schedule isn't that overwhelming."

"You always seem busy to me, Chief. Weren't you complaining about that last weekend?"

He gave me a one-shoulder shrug as he turned to put the groceries away. "Yeah, well, you know how it goes. Feast or famine. I might go hang out with Rafe on Friday night or something, but it doesn't mean I don't want to do things with you."

I wasn't even going to ask if it was the same things. I wasn't going to go there. There live dragons.

"You going to work on this before supper, Jim, or can we get something to eat first?"

"Sure, Chief. I'm still just setting up, anyway." I gave him a smile, an everyday smile. "What do you want to do for dinner?"

***

He was starting to loosen up a little at dinner, but it was still only a ghost of the way he behaved back B.D. - before the dissertation scandal that took him out of academia and set him on the path toward being my permanent, official partner.

It's been six months since he finished at the Academy and came out on the street. Much as I wanted to keep him with me, I had to confess to a love-hate relationship with the process that got him there. I didn't want my warm, open-hearted anthropologist to change into a repressed cop like me, and I was worried about all kinds of things -- hazing at the Academy (didn't happen), hassles from other cops in Cascade (minor, for the most part) and the rigors of full-time police work. The last was the worst, especially on the Gordon case, his first case as a detective, when Simon sent him undercover on surveillance and not with me. I could see him and hear him but had to stay far enough away to reel in the bad guys, and the only way I could be in the same room was to pretend to be a john hiring a boytoy. It was harder than we expected, on both of us.

I know what it's like to get caught in the character you play undercover. Hell, there was a whole year, back in Vice, where I don't think I was anyone else, on or off duty, and I was heading down that road way too fast until a smart-talking new captain pulled me out of it with an offer to move up to Major Crime. But on this job I was strictly backup, window dressing for Sandburg's premiere performance as a detective, and as a predictor of his career it probably wasn't too far off. It was a solid piece of work, with good timing and survival skills at their peak; if for some reason he hadn't made it out we'd have had enough evidence from what he'd found to nail those bastards to the concrete. And through it all, I kept seeing the real man under the act, as well as the teenager he'd once been under the teenager he was playing, and sometimes they were very close.

Somewhere in his gypsy past, he must have lived on the street. He knew too much, too fast. He'd never said a word about it, and I didn't ask. We'd agreed, a while back, to guard each other's solitude, not to intrude.

Unlikely as it seems, I'd always been good at waiting. Between the military and the police, I've made a profession of it. The hardest wait, lately, wasn't at a hospital but at Rainier, outside the conference room when he went to defend his dissertation.

B.J. Sandburg had gone out on the street, and both Sandburg and Blair had come back, but the man who put his notes in order two weeks after he returned from undercover work and assembled a dissertation on closed societies that bore no relationship to his Sentinel studies, handed it in, and scheduled his defense wasn't anyone I'd met since I'd known Blair Sandburg. This man wasn't peaceful, humorous, or curious; he was driven, dedicated and utterly ruthless in attaining his goal. Most people wouldn't have noticed the change; he was still polite, friendly and willing to laugh at a good joke, but it was all surface; in the depths lurked barracudas and things larger and fiercer.

Never put someone in a position where the worst that can happen to him has already happened, because then he will fear nothing.

The Blair Jacob Sandburg who squared his shoulders and went past me into that room to defend his dissertation resembled Michael Jordan a lot more than he resembled Naomi Sandburg's son. Or maybe it was Muhammed Ali, back when nobody had to ask who the greatest fighter was. He'd gone beyond fear or nerves to certainty, and aggression, and absolute implacable will. The team of professors examining him never had a chance. Within an hour they'd awarded him a doctorate in anthropology, with distinction. To do anything else would have been to take their lives in their hands and offer them on any altar he'd choose, and I don't think any of them were willing to do that. Blair was terrifying that day; he even frightened me and I know him better than anyone else.

Afterward, the teaching assistants who had waited with me in the hall and a few of his friends took him out to dinner and for drinks, the traditional celebration. Fairly early in the evening he leaned back in his chair and gave me the look that said, "Get me out of here, please," and I made some excuse of work and he came home with me. He didn't say anything in the truck, not until I parked outside the loft, and then he put a hand on my sleeve as I started to open the door. "Get me drunk, Jim, so drunk I won't remember today," he said, meaning it, and when we reached the loft I got out the hard stuff, the Laphroag and the Absolut and the Metaxa bottle with more stars than the Milky Way on it, and he chose the whiskey. And I took care of him; I made sure that no matter how much he drank he never went over the edge into true alcohol poisoning, but I got him drunk enough that I had to roll him into bed carefully because he was so limp. The next morning he took the bicarbonate and the aspirins and the rest of the traditional cure without a word of complaint, and never spoke about the day before.

Since then, he's relaxed a bit. He's not under the pressure he was to produce publication-ready material; he's starting to get a little space and time into his life and I don't think he knows what to do with it. He's going out more, but coming home alone, not staying out and over. I don't know whether it's because he wants to be alone, or because he's been abandoned by his past lovers; his love life is not an open book to me.

He went through a lot of rejection from people on campus for a while, but that seems to have blown over since he received the doctorate. He's still doing research, he's accepted in his field, and the earlier book frenzy seems to have been written off by his peers as just another inexplicable weirdness of a publishing house's publicity department, and Not His Fault.

When he tells me about who he's out with, often enough it's still someone from the campus, which is reassuring in some ways. On average, there's probably far fewer potential murderers there, though Sandburg would argue that and the old Blair would have been able to give me a statistical breakdown by department and personality type.

I should have learned more about him, from living with him for so long, but he's been studying me, not the other way around. It's hard to look back up through the microscope and know whether what you're seeing is really the size the lenses say it is, or if you're only seeing one eyelash on something so much larger and more complex that words don't cover it.

He doesn't know how I feel about him. I don't know how he feels about me. It's like that TV show about the swordfighter, a few years ago when I caught a few episodes between cases. Two swordfighters, weapons at the ready, back away from doors on the opposite sides of a room, circle one another, always looking away, and only realize the other is there when they bump asses in the middle of the room. And then they're so nervous and startled that they drop their swords.

***

"You think you'll go back to teaching, Chief?" We were walking down Main Street after dinner, checking out the store windows. I was enjoying being out in the air, stretching my legs.

"Probably. Not this semester, though, or the next one." He sent me a wry smile. "I think I need a break after - god - fourteen years of college."

"I can understand that."

"Did I ever tell you what they decided to call me?"

"Besides Dr. Sandburg? Don't think so."

"Assistant professor for law enforcement studies. It won't mean anything until I'm teaching again, but I'm under contract to advise the criminal justice and criminology division on request, and whatever I find to write about is pretty likely to be published."

"Chief, that's great." He didn't say anything. "Isn't it?"

Blair shrugged. "It is and it isn't. The good thing is it's a fairly short-term contract, two years. It's not a lot of money, but it's a respectable amount, considering that all I have to do is show up on campus occasionally and be guest lecturer, which is fun." He stopped in front of an army surplus store to stare at the stacks of K-rations in their faded boxes. "I think I'm still trying to get on my feet, mostly. I'm glad I'm not required to do more for them, but it feels weird not being there."

I hear you, Chief. Blair.

"If there's anything I can do to help," I started, awkwardly, and he raised a hand to wave off my words.

"Thanks, Jim, but this one I have to work out on my own, okay? It'll just take some time."

"Okay. You know where I live."

He punched me in the arm gently. "Yeah. I know."

I patted him on the back and he didn't move away or freeze. "Want to try out that new coffee place up the block? I hear they have good desserts."

He perked up. "You're buying?"

"Yeah. Simon's hinting at another merit raise, and I think we can afford a couple of brownies on that."

***

He went out with Rafe again on Friday. I'd gotten called into Simon's office last thing in the day, and invited out for a beer, and since I hadn't hung out with Simon for a few weeks I agreed to go. We had a couple and relaxed over a game of pool, and by the time I got home there was a note for me on the table saying that my roommate would be back later.

Truth be told, I was glad not to have been there to have to watch him leave. Instead, I put on some music I could move to, pulled out a measuring tape, marked boards, cut them, sanded, did some fitting and minor router work, and got it all cleaned up again by the time Sandburg came home at midnight or so.

"You've been busy," was the first thing he said, coming through the door. "I could smell the sawdust in the elevator."

"It hasn't been bothering me," I said. "I got some things done."

He was wearing a cobalt silk shirt, with a pair of dark jeans loose enough for movement and fitted enough to show what was moving inside them. One earring was back in his ear, one of the small silver hoops, tiny facets glinting in the light. He smelled a little like cigarette smoke, a little like good whiskey, and a lot like Blair.

You'd think Blair would smell herbal, but his underlying scent isn't like that. His hair used to smell like sage and mint from his shampoo, when it was long and held the aromas better, but he himself doesn't smell like a garden. He smells like the aftertaste of hsao hsing wine.

Hsao hsing (pronounced with the 'h' and 's' reversed, 'shao shing') is a Chinese rice wine, a bit like a good scotch, served warm; I found it in the Philippines years ago and in Hong Kong when I was on leave, and I still like it when I can find it. It tastes smoky, dark, a little musky in the back of the throat, like no other drink I've ever found.

When he moved into the light, I saw Blair looking tired, a little lost, and I patted the couch cushion beside me. "Come take a load off. I found something good on the late movie."

"What?" he asked. When he saw the screen his face lit up. "Marx Brothers! Great!" He perched on the arm of the couch, leaning against its back, and watched in delight as more and more people tried to get into the stateroom on the ship. "Looks almost like the squad room downstairs after a major bust, doesn't it?"

"More respectable than the squad room, I think," I said. "These people are dressed, at least. And fairly polite."

He snorted. "It'd be an improvement."

Hsao hsing, and not too musky. It must have been a quiet night for him, though he looked tired. "How was the Onion?"

"Too crowded. We went down to Carnie's."

Carnie's was down by the river, a long way from the Onion. It had a mixed crowd, played more folk and blues than rock, and its clientele liked to sit with their drinks and listen to the music as much as dance. "How was it?"

"Good. They've got a band from Vancouver that knows the blues. Good music."

"Maybe I should check it out one of these days."

"You mean you'll listen to anyone besides Santana?"

I tossed a small sofa cushion at him. "I'm not entirely a caveman, Chief. I do listen to other things occasionally."

"Like what?"

"Jackson Brown." It slipped out before I could catch myself, and caught him by surprise too.

"Hey," he said, leaning in a bit. "What went down with Conner while I was in Records the other day? I couldn't get a straight word out of Rafe or Brown."

"She misunderstood the lyrics to 'Rosie,'" I told him, and he thought about it for all of two seconds before he hit his hand against his leg and howled with laughter. "And while Brown and I were falling over ourselves about it, Simon comes in and sees her hiding in her files and yells at us for not working hard enough."

"Right. No wonder she's pissed. Oh, well, she'll get over it."

"Eventually. But she'll kick hell out of the next three suspects who try to resist arrest."

Blair shook his head slightly, the movement that would have made his hair move like long sweet grass in the wind a year ago. "It's too bad we can't get the word out on the street; the emergency nurses are starting to recognize her shoe print on the bad guys. Still, it keep her from kicking hell out of us."

"That's true." I leaned back on the couch and stretched my legs long under the table, watching the movie. Blair did the same, and as the movie ended an hour later we were relaxed, his head leaning on the side of my shoulder.

It was such a fragile balance, like crystal on an edge. I didn't want to break anything.

I turned my head a little to glance at him. He was watching the ads after the movie under his eyelashes, his eyes reflecting the flickering light from the television. Vulnerable, alone, the last of the shield wall down, the cobalt silk like the night sky outside but softer against my arm than the damp air. His heartbeat wasn't unusual, but it wasn't as strong as I liked to hear it. Through the french doors I could see lightning flashing in the clouds as a thunderstorm approached from the mountains.

"Are you ... all right?" I asked.

Blair didn't move a muscle until the sigh escaped him, and then he seemed to curl into himself a little. "It shows that much," he said under his breath, Sentinel-soft.

"Not to anyone else, I think."

"How long have you known?"

"A while," I said, "but I'm not sure what it is that I know."

He nodded slowly once. "I don't know how to say a lot of it. I don't have anything to compare it to." His head turned on the back of the couch, and I saw his expression, washed clean of surface emotion like the beach after a storm tide. "I feel as if I've gone so far beyond my life that I don't know how to get back to who I am."

Strange as it sounded, I'd been there. I knew about this from the inside. "I felt like that in Peru, and afterward, when I came back here. Like someone's substituted a different map with the places moved, and the ones that haven't moved aren't the same anyway."

"Yes." He leaned forward a little, and I realized he wanted my arm around him, wanted to be held and touched after these weeks of separation. Usually I was the one who needed to talk without words, but not always. I put my arm around his shoulders cautiously and he settled into it and rested his head on my shoulder. His short hair tickled my earlobe; the longer hair would have gone up my nose and into my shirt, but the shorter cut only feathered against my shoulder a little. "And there's no way to go back, even if I wanted to just visit; I've gone off the trail, and any path I take will just lead farther from it still."

I held him and listened to his voice, and knew that I would not trade this for whatever Rafe had found with him. We'd lived in unmapped country together for more than four years, we'd gone deep into the forest and discovered places within ourselves and our lives that others couldn't even imagine. And when the image came to mind, I had to say it, knowing it was the truth, the key, the map to the undiscovered country he was facing.

The storm blew in against the doors, the lightning bleaching his face and hands against the dark silk and receding again in the next second.

All of us have a dark side, between the bolts of lightning that illuminate our lives.

"How long have you been having flashbacks?"

"Weeks." His voice was deep, rough with stress. "Ever since the defense."

"Why then?"

"Doors and windows. Close one, another opens, Naomi always said, and I slammed that sucker shut so hard that it bounced." His hand clenched into a fist, opened slowly, clenched again. "They didn't have any choice, Jim. I forced them to give me the honors, whether they wanted to or not. I needed that degree, I'd earned it and I wanted it, and they fucking had to give it to me."

I remembered the way he'd looked going into his defense, a mountain under a polite growth of trees and foliage to disguise his implacable strength. I'd only seen him anything like that once before, the night he returned from the hospital after he'd drowned, when his willpower was all that kept him going until he'd pushed me into the place in the relationship that we needed to be in - equals, different but the same. Once he'd gotten us there, and I'd understood what was happening, he collapsed physically in my arms and slept on the couch. After the defense, what could that drinking binge have been but another collapse of a different sort, the fall of the house of academic ambitions he'd held for so long and the rise of a different life he'd stepped into and chosen but hadn't completely embraced until then.

And now, was this another collapse, another loosening of the forged steel ties that kept him together as B.J. Sandburg? Or was it something else, something different?

I'd been there with flashbacks. Sometimes I still woke feeling the last other Ranger in Peru dying in my arms after the crash. Sometimes I saw Incacha die again, or the slack expression on Blair's drowned face and the anguish of everyone around the fountain who couldn't put breath into his waterlogged lungs. Sometimes I was even back in that last few cases in Vice, the ones that made me decide to leave that work forever and take Simon's offer, and those were as bad as anything I'd ever been though, but worse, in a way, because they were a part of the job that shouldn't have happened to anyone, like what Blair had endured.

They go away, for a long time. They never go away forever until you let them. You draw them back yourself; you have to learn to let them go. If there's one thing I've had to learn in my life, it's that grasping pain to yourself only keeps hurting you, and it will only heal when you loosen your hands and let it fall out. I'm not very good at it yet.

"How bad are they?"

He stirred a little, shrugged one shoulder. "It's hard to say. Conner will start to hand me a file and her hand will touch my arm, and all of a sudden I'm back in that red and black room and I don't know who's touching me but I feel it throughout my body. Sometimes it's pleasant; I could almost say indecently pleasant. Sometimes it makes my stomach curl, and I freeze. I never know which way it will be, or when it will happen."

God.

No wonder he was unwilling to touch and be touched, the way he had been until the fountain, the way we had been getting back to since then. No wonder he hadn't been dating seriously.

"Not my business, but when you're out with Rafe ..."

"Watching the crowd. Talking. He's interesting. I need another view of police work besides yours, you know." He flicked the button on the remote, and the television screen darkened. "But you have a lot in common; he's an Army vet, Desert Storm, and he's still in the Reserve so he might get called out again."

"I didn't realize that."

Somewhere inside me a mainspring loosened a little, one that had been too tight for a while.

I'd have to get back on track, though. Part of the job, protect the guide.

"The worst of it." His voice dropped off, full of pain and defeat. "I can't. Doesn't matter who. It's not there." His hand clenched again. "I've changed so much; did that have to be part of it?"

He turned toward me more, and I pulled him gently into my arms, so I could hold him securely and let him fall apart the way he'd been waiting to do for so long. The quiet sounds of his tears were lost in the rain hitting the glass on the balcony.

Rosie wasn't in it any more, wasn't even in the same county with the ache I felt inside of wanting to make his life happy again, and knowing that very little of it was anything I could do or control. Faced with Blair's pain, his body's grieving, all I could do was be present, a witness who could still tell him it wouldn't always be that way.

"It happened to me when I returned to the States," I said quietly. "The Army debriefed me, and gave me some counseling, but nothing that helped for that."

His head lay against my chest now, one arm around me in return, his body resting against me. "What did you do?"

"For a while, the wrong stuff. I tried to push it, you know? Force it under control. Doesn't work."

It hadn't worked at Rooney's, the gay bar that catered to former military men and other hard bodies. The one time I went there, all I could see was the men I'd left in Peru, or their doubles, or their ghosts, all over the room. It was years before I could go back to that kind of bar and see the people who were really there. In the meantime, I'd gone elsewhere, to a men's club where I knew I was safe and had the option to say no. I looked at women instead of men at a dance club, because with women you always had the choice of what to do, whether to go further or not, and with men often there were only two speeds, off and on, and on was more than I could manage.

I remembered the pretty brunette who'd said, one dark night, "It's okay, Jim. Just hold onto me. You don't have to do anything," and the way I'd wept on her shoulder for an hour and denied it later. I'd never gone back to see her again. I knew now that I'd owed her a lot, maybe my life, because she'd been the first to accept me as I was and not ask for more than I could give.

"And then?"

"I was in Narcotics, and then Vice, and while I was there I met Carolyn, and it worked. I don't know why it worked with her and nobody else, but it did. And we were married, and I realized afterward that just because that worked, it didn't mean anything else would."

I'd only worked in Narcotics for three or four months, building up contacts, when the Vice job opened up. No problem moving into it; I'd been headed that way for a while, and it made my visits to the bars less suspect, if not legitimate. What I did there, of course, wasn't always as legit as the Captain would have liked, but I was still a good cop. No drugs, and any sexual liaisons were on my own time. And they happened, gradually, as my body and my soul recovered from where and who I'd been and got acclimated to where and who I was now - even if the life I allowed myself was only a fragment of what might have been possible if I'd let myself feel more of what was happening.

But feeling, and knowledge, and understanding had had to wait until Blair.

His hand patted my shoulder. It felt different, feeling him doing that from the front instead of hitting the back of the shoulder blade as usual, but not bad. Never bad. I let myself feel that touch to the bone; I couldn't screen Blair out even if I'd wanted to.

"That sucks, Jim. I'm sorry."

"Yeah. Thanks." I was getting off track; God knows I wasn't suggesting he should chase down Carolyn or some other willing woman as a remedy. "Anyway, I stopped trying to force it. I let it go, and I did other things in my life. I went to the gym. I went camping and fishing. I worked on the bachelor's degree so I could get the promotion to lieutenant and move up to detective, and I let my body recover. And, gradually, it did."

"You gave up on sex?" He sounded a little scared, and I shook my head.

"No, I just didn't try to put myself in a position where I had to perform if I didn't think I wanted to. It's a different thing, Blair. I didn't have to use it to prove anything to myself."

It took too many years and a broken marriage for me to learn that. I hoped it wouldn't take that much for him.

His voice went quiet. "Do you think that's what I've been doing all these years?"

My arm tightened around him. "No way, Chief. I think it's one of the ways you know to make people happy, to give them pleasure. You enjoy it, and so do they, and you're careful and considerate - at least, I guess you are," I finished a little lamely. Wishful thinking. "I haven't been on your dates, but I've watched you with women. You're celebrating being alive. You're not a user."

"Up to now, it's always felt like a celebration," he said. "I know it's not a contest. I've never gone with anyone I didn't think I could make happy, at least for a little while."

"You're good with people, Blair. It's one of the reasons I knew you'd be a good cop, because you care about the people you deal with."

He nodded against my chest again. "Usually. You want to know what I did to the dissertation committee?"

"You didn't hold a gun on them, did you? I think I would've noticed that." I wasn't making light of him, just of that situation, and he knew it. I could feel his muscles moving in a smile of sorts.

"Command voice."

This was something new. I blinked.

"How do you mean?"

"You know the guide voice I use when you're zoning out, the one you have to listen to?"

I nodded, knowing he could feel the movement even if he wasn't looking.

"Add into that the kind of command voice you learn at the academy. Not the top sergeant one that you can hear for three miles, but the quiet one that gives you an order and you know you have to do it." He shook his head a little, side to side, as if marveling that it had been so simple. "I used the quietest voice I could manage that they could hear, and I put guide and command into it, and gave them exactly what they asked for. I put them in a corner they couldn't get out of without going past me, and the only way past was to give me what I wanted. But it took too much out of me, doing it for so long. I've got to learn to ration it."

I held still, letting this sink in. Which of us was more dangerous now, the trained killer with the senses or the one who ran the one with the senses?

"I suppose it's a good thing you're on the side of truth and justice, isn't it, Chief?" I said gently.

"I wouldn't do that to you, Jim. You've got to believe me. I wouldn't treat you like that." He turned in my arms to face me, all but sitting on my lap now. "I didn't like doing it to the committee, but I didn't see another way around the politics, and I wanted that degree. I didn't want all the work I'd done to go for nothing."

He was looking straight at me, and as the lightning flashed I saw lines in his face that hadn't been there a year ago, even after he'd drowned. It was as if drowning had washed away any lines that had been there up to then, and the ones there now were freshly excavated, all rough edges and raw dirt.

"It's another tool. I understand. I really do." I put as much of myself as I could into those words. "You've seen me do an interrogation."

"Yeah. It's like that." He relaxed a little, as if absolving himself. "I wanted to use it back on the Gordon case, but I couldn't do it on the drugs."

"Not your fault."

The worst of the thunderstorm was moving past us, heading east, and now it was just steady rain outside, most of it not even hitting the balcony doors.

"Not your fault," I said again. "None of it was. Or mine. I blamed myself for what happened to you until you opened your eyes in the hospital and knew who I was. I know Simon blamed himself for sending you there."

"Who else could he have sent? None of the other detectives fit the profile. It was me or nobody, and I wanted to find Patty Gordon's killer as much as Simon did." His voice was steady. "I knew it was risky."

I shifted my weight a little, getting more comfortable, and he shifted with me. We'd sat like this in the past after horrendous situations with elevators and kidnaping and rogue agents, when it took holding onto one another for both of us to realize we'd survived. It was something we'd learned that we needed, to stave off nightmares and let reality be a little kinder.

"Can you find something in your old studies to help you through this?" I asked him after a while. "A lot of that goes way past me, Chief, but it always seems to work for you. Maybe some story from some tribe or other?"

"I've done a little reading." His fingers were playing with the placket of his shirt, not nervously but as if they'd been still too long and just wanted to move a little. "From what I can figure, it's closest to a rite of passage, but I can't find anything that shows what happens on the other side. I'm still checking on some of the warrior cults, though."

"Is it another of those bardo things?" I asked.

"Hey," Blair said, "you mean when I was reading you The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying you were actually listening?"

"Some of it, yeah. I remembered that part."

"Cool. You turn me into a cop, I turn you into an anthropologist." He grinned. "Nice thought, but I don't think it works here. Maybe I'll have to go on a shamanic journey, do some meditations. I haven't done that for a while." The lighter tone faded to a more serious but not solemn voice. "I know that if I can find some meaning in what's happening, I'll be able to cope with it better, and things will improve. That's the way my mind works. I need to find some symbols, some metaphor that will give me a handle on it."

"Whatever it takes. You need any help, you let me know." I let my senses loose a little further; his heartbeat was steady, his breathing less labored than before, his muscles more relaxed. "This shamanic journey, is that something you have to go away for a couple of days or something?"

He shook his head. "Not necessarily. It's a kind of meditation, guided imagery. You start with imagining a certain kind of place and time, and then you leave it open and go on from there. With the shamanic work, though, you need to have someone around to get you out of it if you stay in too long. Can you do that for me?"

"How long's too long?" I asked. "Couple of hours?"

"Not even that. Half an hour, forty minutes at most at the point I'm at. You don't do the meditation with me; you keep track of the time and hit the drum I have in the other room to bring me out of it. It's a pre-arranged signal; I'll know I have to come out."

"I can do that." I could do a lot more than that, if I had to, if he needed me to. Whatever it took. "You know, Maida's been going in earlier than usual on Mondays to catch up on things. It's a good time to drop by and see her, if you want to talk or to see when she's free."

It took a moment for him to process this. "You've been going to see Maida on your own?"

"Yeah. She helped, too. Give her a chance. She's willing to take some stuff off the record, and all this crap you're dealing with is certainly work-related. She'll write the report to show that, and the rest will be confidential. I trust her." I thought about Maida's calm acceptance of what I hadn't said aloud, and her willingness to be helpful. "I trust her a lot."

"That's good to know. I might talk to her on Monday, see if she can spare some time for me this week."

The rain was easing up outside; I could hear the taxis and the trucks splashing on the streets below us. It had been a long day, but the weekend wasn't over yet.

How could I say what I wanted to say, so that he wouldn't take it wrong?

"Chief - "

"What?"

"My leg's starting to go to sleep, and the rest of me's pretty close too, but I don't want to stop this if you need it." I swallowed hard, and tried to continue in the same voice, concerned, not casual. "If you still need to hold on for a while, you can come upstairs."

And waited for the response.

"Thanks, Jim, I really appreciate it, but I think I'll be better. Talking helped, you know. I'll sleep downstairs. But I appreciate the offer."

I let my voice go just a tinge grumpy, because I knew he'd understand grumpy and he might not be able to accept the tenderness I felt. "I wasn't offering to jump your bones, Einstein; you're not in the mood and it would probably confuse the hell out of your body right now with those flashbacks. But if you still want to be close enough for some nonverbal communication, the offer's open."

He relaxed a little more, accepting the grumping, translating it into a level of caring that he could deal with. "I'm down with that, Jim. Listen, if I start to have nightmares or something, I might just take you up on it, but right now I think I'm all right, okay? But thanks for the offer. I appreciate it."

"Okay," I said, and watched him get up slowly and wander to his room and shut the door, walking a little more loosely than when he'd come into the loft a few hours earlier.

From upstairs I reduced my hearing to just picking up his heartbeat. If he wanted me, for anything, he'd let me know. He had enough to deal with; he deserved privacy for it. But he started his quiet snore fairly soon, so I followed suit with a clear heart.

***

Monday was mostly boring; it was a court day. We sat in the back of Judge Dench's courtroom and waited to do our part at three pre-trial hearings and a couple of other procedural matters. It took all day, and was tiring as hell. There was enough perfume and aftershave in the room that it stuck to my clothes and messed with my sense of smell. Even the two cups of Simon's good coffee that I drank on breaks and the lunch at Rinaldo's Sub Shack couldn't compete. When I got home I hung the jacket and slacks on the porch to air and threw the rest of the clothes into the washer immediately. It was bad enough that it got to Sandburg, too; when he came in a few minutes later he took one look at the jacket on the porch, and me emerging from the shower, said, "Good idea," and did the same thing.

The first thing Tuesday, Simon called us in and handed us an organized-crime-bribery- racketeering case that had originated as a beat cop's incident report and had grown like poison ivy. It was complex, full of odd details, and I was delighted. It gave Sandburg something to work on that would keep his mind happy, and it would get me away from paperwork and the courtroom. We checked out the trunk of the old Plymouth Barracuda where a body had been found, and the evidence that had been brought in, and Sandburg started to put together a theory about stratified mob societies and relationships that gave me a few more ideas. Simon sent us home at five because we knew we'd be on stakeout on Wednesday, so we picked up Francesca at the bakery and headed for the park for an hour or so.

***

Watching Francesca with an ice cream cone was always fun, even if half of it ended up on the ground or dripped over her hand. She kept one hand in mine, the other firmly around her cone of double chocolate fudge, and talked with Blair in between little messy licks at it.

"B'air, do they come off at night?" Her English had improved immensely in the past few months; when I'd met her the day after she arrived, she would only speak in Spanish.

"The carousel horses?"

"Mm-hm." Lick. Lick. Fast lick to catch a dribble on the back of her hand, that almost put the whole cone in her hair until I stopped and steadied it for her. "Do they get out and run around at night?"

"Well, I haven't seen it, 'Ceska, but they might. I know they did it in a story once," Blair said, and then started to tell her about the horse race in "Mary Poppins."

"You know about Mary Poppins, Chief?"

"What, you think I was kept in a bubble? Of course I know about it; I saw it six times when it was re-released, talking parrot umbrella and all."

"Can I ride the horses today?"

"One ride, after you finish your ice cream, okay?" I told her. She skipped for a few steps, not to keep up with me but because she felt like it, and nodded, and licked faster. It was a junior-size cone, but still pretty big for her.

The park was busier than I'd expected, probably because it stopped raining earlier in the day and everyone wanted to walk their dogs now. What that meant, though, was a lot of snapping and the occasional snarl from dogs that didn't want to be sociable about the same tree. Most of it was pretty good-natured, so I wasn't worried. The rain had damped down the scents, but now they were rising again: wet green grass and leaves, damp mop smells from the dogs that had gone swimming in the creek nearby and fuzzy dust smells from house dogs that were emerging after the day's rain. Dog breath, a combination of everything that any dog had eaten, with a surprising overlay of wild rice, and the less mentionable smells around bushes and trees and by the side of the path where the pooper-scoopers missed.

"I talked to Maida this morning, and I'll go see her again tomorrow if we can fit it in," Blair said. "I don't know why I hesitated."

"Not an easy thing to talk about."

"Definitely. I think it might help, though. She's sort of shock-proof; I don't have to worry that I'll upset her."

"If you didn't talk, that would upset her."

"When we get through all this, I'd like to have her come over for dinner some time, if that's all right with you. Just as a friend."

"Fine with me, if she wants to. You can make lasagne."

"You know, I'll make it any time you want. It's not just for guests."

"I know, Chief."

A sharp scent cut through my consciousness, and I sniffed around to find its source. Hot emotions, fear and lust, and not all of them human.

The snarl arose from behind me, and I heard the racing heartbeat at the same time as the paws on the sidewalk. As I swung around I saw a short, muscular dog break away from his owner, savage the throat of a smaller dog, and cast about for new prey. It saw Francesca, and swerved toward us as if she were alone.

The scent of blood cut the air like a knife, and the little dog's owner screamed over the limp body of her pet..

Vision cut in and narrowed on the approaching dog: rough-coated, a cross between a pit bull and an airedale, with the smooth curved skull and enormous jaw of a dog bred for battle. Its eyes weren't sane. Its muzzle and throat were streaked with blood, and its collar looked wrong.

I swung Francesca up into my arms, up to my shoulder, so fast that she dropped her ice cream cone.

The dog would reach us in a few seconds, running with its tongue tucked up, snarling as it came at us. I reached for the pistol in the back of my belt.

Sandburg came around in front of me, his mouth set in a tight line, his reflexes up. He threw a spinning kick at the dog, hitting it in the ribs and knocking it aside from us. The dog struggled to its feet - at least two ribs had broken with that kick - and gave an odd whimpering snarl, and surged toward us again, not quite as fast.

"Get her out of here," my partner said in a voice I couldn't disobey, and shot the dog as it reached his feet.

I caught his eye just before the dog's owner arrived. "I'll call for backup." He nodded and handed me the cellphone, and turned his attention to arresting the owner for allowing a dangerous animal to move freely in the public park, reckless endangerment, and anything else he could think of.

Francesca's eyes had gone big and still. She held onto my neck tightly and whispered, "Bad wo'f,." and I realized that the snapping, growling wolves in the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast" had been the same shade of gray as the motionless body on the sidewalk. Sandburg had taken it down with one clean shot to the head, which hung off the edge of the pavement and bled into the wet grass.

I made sure Sandburg saw where I was headed, and he nodded over the heads of the people whom he was trying to quiet down. Two patrol cars had pulled up, and the situation was under control. I walked over to the carousel and we got a few tickets so we could stay on the big wooden horses until Blair was free. Francesca perched ahead of me on a pretty palomino horse in the second row, her favorite, and we went around and around for a while as the calliope music covered the sounds of commotion nearby. I'd learned to dial it all down just below what Blair considered a normal level, and I found that I actually enjoyed it as long as I could hold onto Francesca to anchor me.

"Jim?"

"Yes, sweetheart?"

"You saved me from the wo'f. You're a good Beast."

I hugged her close for a moment. "Thank you."

"Can we pet Sherman after the horse ride?"

Sherman was a sweet-faced golden retriever who lived a couple houses away from the park. He was well trained and loved children, and the worst she'd ever have to expect from Sherman was getting her face licked.

"If Sherman is here, you can pet him. You're not scared, are you?"

"Sherman's a nice dog. That was a bad wo'f." Her eyes went big again for a moment. "Is B'air okay?"

"He's okay. He'll be with us soon." The crowd that had gathered was starting to disperse. Sandburg was handling the situation well; from what I could tell, he'd filled in Officer Larotta on the details, and she and Officer Markby were taking care of it all, getting names of witnesses and their accounts of what they'd seen, while two other officers were putting the attack dog's owner in the back of a patrol car in handcuffs.

By the time we were finishing our fourth ride, Blair had joined us on the next carved animal, a seven-foot giraffe on the outside ring.

"I told them we'd go to the station after we take Francesca home," he said. "They want to get the reports done tonight in case of problems."

"I expected it." I looked down at my little rider. "'Ceska, time to go home."

"Okay. Sherman?"

"We'll look for Sherman."

We took a different route back, going past the pond with the ducks so she could wave to them, and through the rose garden. Sherman and his owner were watching the old men play chess, and Francesca petted Sherman and told him to be careful about 'wo'ves' in the park.

"Wolves?" Sherman's owner asked.

"We had an incident earlier with a dog, part pit bull," I told her. "It's taken care of."

"I thought I heard something." She glanced at Francesca hugging the dog that was twice her size and then up at me again. "We're all glad you live here, you know. It's been a lot nicer neighborhood the past few years, even when we didn't see you as much."

I thanked her, and we went on. Blair picked Francesca up and carried her for a while, and she told him to be careful about 'bad wo'ves' and he said he would. When we reached the bakery, we took Margarita, her grandmother, aside for a moment to tell her what had happened. She took it well, thanking us for keeping Francesca safe, and we accepted a loaf of raisin-cinnamon-nut bread and headed back to the station.

"You all right?" I asked him in the truck.

"I am now. It was heart-attack city for a while."

"I hear you." His heartbeat was almost down to normal. "You did a good job there."

"I know. I was so scared it would get to her." He shuddered. "I hate hurting an animal, but I don't feel bad about taking that one out. I found out from the neighbors that it was a fighting dog, and they'd filed complaints about it before but nothing had happened."

"That explains the collar."

"Collar?"

"Some owners use heavy studded collars on the dogs, with the studs on the inside. That one, the studs weren't short. Some of them looked sharp."

Blair looked ill. "Who could do that to a dog? Or to any animal? No wonder it attacked; that's probably all it was ever praised for - if it was ever praised for anything." He shook his head. "The owner's the kind of jerk that wants a fighting dog for the same reason some people want guns, and with as little understanding of them. This time he's getting charged with reckless endangerment and second-degree attempted assault, as well as a civil property damage suit from the other dog's owner, and it's getting passed over to Animal Control for a full investigation of how he takes care of his animals. I'll make a note of the collar in the report, and they'll take him down for cruelty to animals as well."

He still looked distressed. "You did a good job there," I said again.

"Thanks. Jim," he said, his voice shifting with his emotions. His eyes were dark, but his gaze was more inward than outward. He came back with a rush and looked up at me. "I couldn't have done this if I'd still been an observer."

"No, you couldn't." I said. "Let's get the paperwork done and go home."

***

My hands were shaking too much that night for me to want to risk them with power tools, but by Wednesday night I really wanted to get back to work. I needed to be able to let myself feel the emotions that had welled up when Blair had put himself between me and that crazed dog. Unfortunately, we were on stakeout until midnight, for the next five nights, snatching sleep during the odd hours when we weren't filling out paperwork, scarfing down food or trying to do laundry and groceries and remembering to pay the bills.

Somehow we'd missed our man, and the case went on a side burner for a while. I talked to my usual street sources, all of whom agreed that something would go down soon but no one had a timetable. Simon told us to shift it down in priority when a city councilman's wife was killed in a drive-by shooting, and we changed gears and went on.

Sandburg got through the paperwork that ensues from discharging a firearm, on or off duty, and was commended for his prompt action. Margarita told me she'd acquired some new customers, as almost everyone who had been in the park stopped by to ask how Francesca was and went away again with a few sweet rolls or a loaf of bread.

Work went on. Life went on in the spaces between work. Blair went to see Maida, and started writing in his journal a lot. Sometimes I could hear him crying in his room. The first time, I went down and asked quietly if there was anything I could do. He said, through the door, that he was working some things out, and he'd be upstairs later.

And he was. He let himself cry out whatever was hurting him, and dried his tears, and walked up the stairs to where I lay and curled up next to me. He let me hold him the rest of the night, and put an arm around me in return, and neither of us said anything about it the next morning or any other morning.

I let myself feel what I felt, and didn't try to quash it. I didn't do anything about it except to be there, but I wasn't jealous of Rafe any more. It had less to do with Blair coming upstairs at night than it did with me realizing how interwoven our lives had become.

It helped when I ran across a line in a book Megan had left by her desk after lunch one day, something by Rita Mae Brown about warring neighbors across the Mason-Dixon Line. She'd stepped away to help someone, and I'd had to wait for a call, and nobody was around, so I flipped through it. One of the characters told another that nobody could be everything to another person; the most they could hope for was to be three-quarters of what someone else needed, and other friends were meant to be there to fill in the gaps for each other.

I had a lot to think about.

After about ten days of that punishing schedule we wrapped up the drive-by shooter, a disgruntled constituent who thought the democratic process took too long, and got a break on the racketeering case with a witness who agreed to turn state's evidence in return for police protection, and Simon told us to go home for two days.

***

"Poker game at Simon's tomorrow," Blair said. "We're bringing chili."

"And turkey; I got some smoked turkey legs on special. But no octopus."

"Good. I hate octopus, even in sushi."

"I thought you'd eat anything if it came on a little bed of rice and wasabi."

"Not octopus. It's purple."

"What does that have to do with it."

"I don't drink grape juice, I don't eat grape jelly. I don't do purple food, Chief."

"You know, it's too bad the diss is done; that would've made a great footnote."

And I knew he really was starting to feel better.

***

I spent hours working with wood while Blair was out wandering around, enjoying the freedom to sit in a coffeehouse and read a novel and browse bookstores. I don't know how it was for him, but for me it was fantastic.

By the end of that time, the major pieces of my project had been roughed in, cut, routed, and sanded. I took the project down to the workroom in the basement that had the big electric fan, and fine-sanded the pieces so they would even feel smooth to my touch. I partly assembled the pieces, to make sure everything fitted and didn't need to be adjusted, and looked at it from every direction to see what I wanted to do with it next, and started on the trim with some matching scrap wood that had a pleasing gloss to its grain.

All the time, I let it flow, this feeling I had for Blair, this emotion that had started with a physical itch and a sensing need and had grown to something I couldn't quantify or contain any longer. I caressed the wood as if I were touching his skin; I put the tenderness I felt into the smooth surfaces and steady lines. I could almost feel a glow of response as I worked, coming back to me from the thing I was shaping with my hands and my tools and my mind.

I hoped he'd like it when it was done.

***

Blair came back from the bookstore an hour later than I expected, and not alone. I'd gotten the place cleaned up while he was out, and had settled down on the couch to check out the channels when I heard the set of footsteps following Blair. I also heard Blair talking a mile a minute, and figured I didn't have to worry about him being ambushed unless the other person just wanted him to shut up a moment.

"Hey, Jim, look who I found in the stacks."

It was Rafe, a hesitant smile on his face. "Hope I'm not intruding," he said.

"Not at all. You want a beer or something?"

Sandburg, this better not be a case of 'he followed me home, can I keep him,' because the answer is no.

I got up from the couch and headed for the fridge.

"I didn't think you'd mind if he came up for dinner." His eyes were searching for the woodworking equipment, but I knew he wouldn't find even a speck of sawdust. When a Sentinel does the cleaning, even the dust mites take a hike.

"Fine with me, Chief. It's your turn to cook." I handed Rafe a beer.

"And I don't suppose you left any of the salsa or the soup?"

"'Fraid not. That all went for lunch."

"If it's going to be any trouble -" Rafe started.

I waved a hand. "Relax. This is normal. Have a seat. He'll think of something; he always does."

Blair was shoulder deep in the fridge, checking out the supplies. "Okay, I know what I'll get. Just wait here, and I'll be back from the store in a few minutes." And he was out the door.

Rafe watched this display of the Sandburg Whirlwind Effect with a smile that held a little surprise. "It's good to see him feeling better. I was starting to get really worried."

"You too?" I asked.

He nodded and sat down on the loveseat, leaving me the couch to sprawl on. "Oh, yeah. I mean, he's been through so much in the last two years, especially this year." He took a drink of beer. "And then the Gordon case."

"You knew about the flashbacks," I said.

He nodded slowly. "Been there, done that."

"When?"

"Desert Storm."

That got my attention. "I don't remember your name in the news."

"It wasn't. They managed to keep it quiet, but I was captured for two days before I was rescued." Rafe stared at one of the tribal masks on the wall. "Longest two days of my life. I wasn't drugged, like Blair, not that it helped much later."

"And I suppose they didn't give you any counterterrorist training, or any of the anti-interrogation techniques we got in Rangers?"

He shook his head. "Shit, Jim, we were regular Army and reserves, that's all. We didn't even have good boots for the terrain until part way through, we were wearing our feet out with Vietnam leftovers meant for heavy jungle. Try wearing those in the sand!" His face was unreadable, an expression I remembered seeing in the mirror often enough in the past. "Anyway, by the time my unit found me, I wasn't in the greatest shape on the outside, and worse on the inside."

I knew that feeling. I could have gone insane with it sometimes.

"The flashbacks started when I was a patrolman. Certain shapes of rooms, stupid things. The shape of the tables in the break room. I couldn't stand to go in there until they redecorated after the Iceman shot the place up."

That made sense of why, when he was juniormost in Major Crime, Brown would get his coffee for him. It also made sense of Brown's protective attitude toward him. "But you're better now?"

"Yeah."

"How'd you know what was going on with him? What gave it away?" I asked slowly. "It took me a while, and I live with him."

"Don't feel bad. It didn't seem to happen when you were around," Rafe said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "Makes sense you wouldn't have seen it. One day when you were in a meeting with Simon, I saw Megan touch his arm to get his attention, and it looked like he'd been hit with a taser. She wasn't looking, she didn't notice what happened, and he had it under control enough that by the time she turned around he could just answer her fairly normally. I couldn't let him hurt like that, so I said I needed to talk with him about a case, and we went down into an interview room, and I told him what I'd seen."

"I'm glad you were there," I said sincerely. "When was that?"

He named a date I recognized as being a week or so before I'd seen that glance they'd exchanged. "He told me a little, not much. Enough that I knew. And I asked him to go out club- crawling with me. I figured if he had someone with him he wouldn't feel as bad about feeling so bad, if you know what I mean."

"Looks like it helped."

"Yeah. Something did, at least. He's starting to bounce again. Brown's going to put marks on the doorframe and start an office pool on how high he bounces when he walks in one of these days."

"Is there anything he won't gamble on?"

"Actually, there is." Rafe glanced across at me. "You. He says you're totally unpredictable."

"Does he?"

"C'mon, Ellison. You had that fearsome rep from Vice, you come up to Major Crime and freeze out an entire side of the room just by walking in, you take shit from nobody for years, you work alone and still get the best closure rate in the department, and then you thaw out and turn into a really nice guy because of a fast-talking grad student? How likely is that?" He looked a little nervous, as if all this categorization would get him thrown out.

I grinned at him. "So the odds would've been high. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen. It did."

"And we're all grateful, believe me. You know, when I was a uniform, you're one of the biggest reasons I wanted to move up to the Major Crime unit; I figured if I got a chance to work with you I could really learn something." He paused, a smile hiding in his expression.

"And did you?"

"Definitely. We need to get a grad student in for Captain Banks." The smile broke through, totally charming. "I figure if having an anthropologist around helped you, just think what someone with the right degree and concentration could do for Simon."

"Hey, I resemble that remark."

"You usually do," Blair said, carrying in a large bag of groceries. "So, what did you say you wanted to get Simon?"

"A grad student of his own. It worked for Ellison," Rafe said. "Who knows, he might even start winning at poker again. He sure didn't last night.

"Hmm." Blair set the bag on the counter and started to take out packages of food. "I suppose it might be possible, if we could find someone with the appropriate academic discipline..."

"Chief, I'm not even going near there."

***

We sat around and shot the breeze after dinner, and had a good time watching one of the 'Naked Gun' movies that Blair had picked up at the video store. After Rafe left, I helped Blair with the cleanup, and I started upstairs.

"Jim?"

I turned, my foot on the second step. "What? You all right, Chief?"

Blair waited, at the door of his room, the hand on the doorframe trembling a little. "Would it be all right with you if I come up now, instead of waiting for later? I think I need us to speak nonverbal languages for a while."

My heart jumped, skipped, pounded again, and I told it to calm down. "Fine with me. Come up whenever you want."

His hand dropped off the doorframe. "You sure?"

"Yes. Are you?"

"No, but I'm working on it."

"Do you want to talk too? We can do that."

"Not for a while. Later."

I went up the stairs, took off my clothes, got into bed, and when I turned to reach for the light he was there, on the other side, getting under the covers.

In all the times he'd come upstairs, this was the first when we'd both be on the same side of the sheets and blankets. He'd always huddled near me, I'd put my arms around him and pulled the spare blanket at the foot of the bed up over him, and he'd nestled into my shoulder with a sigh and a little shiver and fallen asleep.

This time, he rolled over on his side and came up on his elbow, watching me with a solemn expression. "Would you leave it on, Jim?"

I turned to face him. "Do you want to tell me what's going on?" I asked, as quietly as possible. We needed to talk then, not later. He started to get out of bed, and I stopped him with a hand on his arm. "I just need to understand. Please. Do I have to go get that contract you made me write?"

He came back to bed. "I burned it."

"I saved the ashes."

"You would." He'd relaxed a little with that. Before, the tension in him had hummed like the reverberation of electric lines buzzing with live current, a sound so constant that I could only distinguish it when it was gone. "I need ... a friend."

He'd never used those words together before that I could remember. I held back the automatic comment that would've sounded too sarcastic, and gave the arm I was touching a little rub.

"Would you ... touch me and ... let me touch .. you ... so I know ... it's ... not a flashback?" His voice was low, hesitant, but his eyes were steady on mine, not quite begging but not far from it. "I know it's a lot to ask, but I need someone I can trust, and I don't trust anyone else as much as you.."

I took a deep breath, my heart pounding slowly, still keyed to that hum I could feel coming from him. "Are you sure? I'm not any kind of sex therapist or anything."

"I'm sure. If you don't ... mind."

"I don't mind, Blair. It's all right."

He lay back on the pillow, staring at the ceiling as if uncertain what to do next. "I think I need to start with a hug."

I settled into place and opened my arms, and he moved into them just as he had done for weeks, but for the first time I could feel the warmth of his skin down to his briefs, and his fuzzy, strong legs beyond them. I closed my eyes to keep from being overwhelmed by emotion as well as sensation, and managed not to zone.

His heartbeat spiked once, as he slid into my arms, and came back down again to normal. "How do you want to do this," I whispered into his hair. "Whatever you want, but how?"

Blair's hand touched my arm and slid down to the hand. "It's a control thing, I think. If I can feel you touch me, but I control where..." He put his hand over mine and brought it to his shoulder, where I let my fingers ripple once, watching his face. He looked good. I kneaded a tight muscle and he nodded. "Yeah." I moved my hand more lightly and it was still good, until I tried a very light caress and his face twisted. "Whoa. Not so good."

"So light touches are out and massage is in?"

"I don't know. It might be a localized thing. I don't know how the reactions will go everywhere." His eyes came to meet mine, bright blue but not dark at all, nervousness and fear suppressing relaxation. I went back to the slightly stronger rub against his skin, and his pupils opened again. "That's better. Try it somewhere else?

***

We stopped after an hour; it was enough. Sections of his ribs and back couldn't be touched lightly at all; other areas, like his legs, could take anything and give him pleasure. The places one would normally think of as erotic zones were totally unpredictable, making him glow one moment and making his stomach muscles ripple with nausea when an invisible switch turned over.

Even with Sentinel senses, it was almost impossible to touch him in a sensual way and know it wouldn't be painful.

At the end of the time, I offered to give him a backrub and promised to keep a steady pressure. He agreed and rolled over immediately, Rather than straddle him and inadvertently touch an area that would cause discomfort, I worked from next to him, rubbing his shoulders and upper and lower back, pushing the muscles to loosen.

"Jim?"

"Yes, Blair?"

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. I just wish it could have gone better."

"Actually, it went pretty well, I think. I know more than I did before. I'd like to try this again in a few days, when we have some time."

It was a good thing I wasn't straddling him, considering the reaction my body gave to his words. I tucked the covers around me a little more and kept working on his lower back just below his waist. "All right with me, Chief. Do you want to stay up here tonight?"

He sighed. "I think I'd better go downstairs. It's not the company, Jim; I'm just feeling a little overstimulated, and I think I'd better sleep by myself."

I'd half expected that reaction. The other half of me, of course, wanted to tackle him to keep him in the bed, but I knew I wouldn't do that. He'd been assaulted enough.

"Wherever you think you'll get enough sleep. Offer's open if you decide to come back up."

He rolled to face me, my hand still on his shoulder. "Jim, you're the best friend I could ever have, but I don't want to use you."

"You're not. I want to help." Even if it means you go to someone else, at least you'll go healed, not bleeding inside.

He leaned back across to hug me, the first time he'd initiated a hug in months. "I know. I'll see you in the morning." I felt the briefest kiss just in front of my ear, and then he was out of bed and heading downstairs.

I stared at the ceiling in the dark, letting myself feel.

***

We were sitting in the truck on stakeout two days later, a long rainy afternoon made longer by having to sit outside a warehouse waiting for something to happen, when he said, "You go down to Scandals sometimes, don't you?"

I didn't look away from the building, though I wanted to see his face, but I nodded slowly. "That's right. The owner and I went to school together."

Scandals was the bar in the old Arlington Hotel, the one that had a game room, lounges, a dance floor, good food, and a growing mixed-toward-gay clientelle. It was Cascade's answer to Studio 54, without the celebrities or the tax fraud. I'd worked with the owners to deal with problems when it opened, during my time in Vice, and stayed in touch, and I had a permanent invitation without the cover charge - which I never took. I didn't like the appearance of a bribe. Instead, I had an understanding with George, the owner, that I'd pay the cover and if and only if he was feeling generous I'd accept one free drink from him. He was always generous with information and contacts as well, so I dropped by when I could for a few minutes.

"Back when I was in Vice, there was a murder there with a drug tie-in that I solved. I proved that the murderer wasn't in the club; he'd picked the girl up on the street walking home later on. Because of that, George thinks I saved his club." I sipped the rapidly cooling coffee from the thermos. "You and I know it's just good police work. But he's grateful."

"I don't think that's the only reason you go, is it." Factual, just another data point. Was this Sandburg, the detective, or Blair, my friend?

Scandals was a haven from the '70s that had adapted to the '90s. Sometimes I went to sit in the lounge and talk with friends from that part of my life - after the Rangers and before Major Crime - who wouldn't speak to me as a cop. Sometimes I just went there to watch the dance floor or to take a break from the work, letting the rough cases and disappointments fall off at the door. I hadn't been there as much in the past few years, maybe once a month, but I'd never stopped. I just made a point of going when he was out dating someone else.

"No." There were a lot of reasons, none of which I had to explain to anyone.

He'd never needed explanations, anyway. Even before he went through the Academy he'd been a good detective.

"How long have you known?"

"For sure, a little over a year. I saw you over by the bar one night when I was there with Celina. It was back when Aria was the dance band. You were talking with Nelinus."

My eyebrows went up. I hadn't realized he was so far into that part of the club scene that he'd even know who Nelinus was.

"You could've said something, you know." He wasn't accusing me of anything, not even of withholding information. He was just letting me know that he knew, and it was all right. No harm, no foul.

"It never seemed to be the right time," I murmured.

Nelinus ran an extremely discreet men's club, more along the lines of a British home-away-from -home men's club than anything else, with his name on the door in plain gold paint and no other advertising. I knew him from years past as a man who was determined to provide safe places for gay men of good character to meet. No rent boys were allowed in, and he took care to make sure his clientele played it safe. Membership fees could be waived - he believed it was more important to have people who should be there as members than to prevent them for the sake of a few dollars - but medical checkups were required. His staff doctor did blood tests, and the results were in his confidential file. He would do whatever was necessary to maintain the privacy of his club and the safety of its members, and I respected him for it.

"How do you know about Nelinus?" This wasn't the conversation I'd thought we might have on a stakeout.

"Professor Rutland in Anthro is a member of his club," Blair said calmly. "He offered to sponsor me a few years ago, if I was interested, but I didn't have the money for the initiation fee. It didn't seem like the right time, then. He understood."

I'd known he dated women; I'd guessed about the men but hadn't been certain.

If I'd met Blair in any other circumstances than the ones we were in, I would probably have offered to sponsor him myself; he more than met Nelinus's criteria of integrity and character.

Now -

"Would've been interesting if we'd met there, wouldn't it?" Blair grinned at me.

"Right. You'd make me lose my reputation for knowing everything that's going on, all the time." I let my smile answer him. "But it wouldn't have surprised Nelinus; he'd already have run his own check on you before you even got in the door."

"I figured as much. It's a good club. I just didn't want to feel that settled in, back then."

"It's a good place to meet people," I offered. "I've always liked his policy of checking your social status at the door."

"Yeah. That was attractive. But at the time I was having enough trouble with one closed society, so I didn't think I needed another one." Blair's smile went rueful. "And I wasn't sure how reliable they'd consider me; I was all over the place sexually. Men, women, even a few people that didn't fit into the acceptable categories really well. I was playing it safe with all of them, very safe, very careful, but they could've considered me risky."

"You're not still doing that, are you?" I asked casually.

He shook his head. "Not for a while. I didn't have the time or energy to do that much chasing after I started working with you, and I didn't really want to, anyway."

"Nelinus's is a good place for business contacts, like any other private club," I said. "If you want, I'll sponsor you. You can afford it now, I think." If he couldn't, I could make arrangements.

"Not sure I need that, but thanks." He put his coffee down. "Give me the camera; something's going on over there."

And we got back to work.

***

"Were you ever going to say anything about it?" Blair asked me as we headed home after the long day.

"Yes." I knew I would have done it, eventually. "My timing always sucks, doesn't it. But you already knew."

He nodded. "It wasn't part of the diss, or your work, so I figured it wasn't my business. If you wanted me to know, you'd say something. It didn't bother me."

"You weren't worried about me hitting on you or something?" I'd wondered about that.

"Jim, the only thing I worried about was whether you'd put me through a wall when you got mad. The idea of you hitting on me sexually was, like, way down the list after that." He gave me one of his best Blair smiles, the one that's open and easy and relaxed. "I'm not afraid of you; I never have been."

"Good." We got out of the truck and into the elevator before I said, "And about yourself?"

"I knew you'd figure it out." His blue gaze anchored me. "I also know how much rope you're giving me."

"Is it enough?"

"Yeah, it is." He dropped his backpack by the door - he still carried it on the job, even after the transition to detective, often as not - and hung up his jacket. "But it might be too much for you. Are you going to be all right if I start dating again?"

"I'll be all right." I turned to face him after I hung up my own jacket, but I didn't touch him although he was only a foot away. I could feel the heat of his blood moving under his skin, and smell the complicated flavor of his damp hair that had picked up traces of everywhere we'd been that day. "I'm not easy, Blair."

"Neither of us are. I don't think we'd be partners of any kind if either of us was that easy."

***

Oh, he wasn't easy at all. Nor was it easy for him to come upstairs that night, to ask with a look for what I could give him, and to accept what he could of it. I'd promised myself that until he was better I wouldn't ask anything in return; I didn't want this gift to have that kind of price.

In the midst of touching him, of running my hands down his sides and up across his nipples to his shoulders and sweeping back down again, his back arched and his eyes opened wide, unseeing, staring straight into me. He breathed words that even I couldn't quite hear, and reached for me in return, pulling me down close to himself, and wrapped his arms around me tightly. I swept a hand past his shoulder and down his back and pulled him onto his side so I could reach further, and he sighed into my ear, "yes."

But the next touch made him squirm uncomfortably, so I went back to holding him and praying to an unknown god that he be healed. As I held still, he started to move, to touch me back, to give me a little of what I was giving him. It was almost more than I could bear, that hesitant touch that lit my skin afire.

In all of this, we still hadn't kissed, not really. It wasn't that kind of situation. Gentle as it was, thorough as I tried to be, it was still an effort at scientific desensitization. There was room for care and even tenderness, but none at all for the feelings that threatened to drown me whenever I looked at him, or felt his skin brush mine.

Letting him get out of bed and walk away afterward was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

***

He went out with Rafe again, the next night, and on the following Friday.

As soon as he was out the door, I went down to the basement and finished fine sanding the fitted pieces, put them together, and gave them their first coat of low-gloss varnish. There was enough wood left over for something small; I took out the tools and did a little chip carving to make a pattern on one rounded scrap, then fitted it together with a few others to make a set of bookends and gave them the same treatment.

By Friday the varnish was dry, and I sanded again very lightly and gave the pieces one more coat, thinned so the finish would be immaculately smooth but light enough to let the gloss of the grain show through.

It felt as if I was the one being carved and sanded, emotionally, instead of the wood. The more I did, the more I let my emotions loose from their chains as I worked alone, the more I could accept their existence and their reality, their trueness. Doing this gave me a sense of ... not control, not anything as heavy as that but balance.

Blair had been there for me for nearly five years, through some of the worst times I'd lived through, and had come through every time with intelligence, caring and integrity, even when I'd been at my worst. I'd given him every reason to reject me more than once, and he refused to do so.

Under the veneer of the Sentinel project, he'd given me more than he'd ever dreamed, more than I'd ever expected to find from anyone.

If it was my turn to be there for him for a while, I could do it. It wasn't a road I'd expected to take, or one that I knew how to travel, but I'd learned so much from Blair that I could do this, too.

I could wait.

***

"Maida, do you have a minute or two?" Her door had been open, so I stuck my head in to find her behind her desk.

"Sure, Jim. Come on in." She closed a file drawer and sat back as I shut the door behind me. "I'm pretty tightly scheduled today, but I can fit you in if you want."

"No need. I just wanted to tell you that you were right, and it worked." I smiled at her and handed her a package wrapped in gift paper. "And I wanted you to have this."

"This isn't necessary, Jim. Really." But she was holding it carefully, as if she was sensing the gift through the paper the way I would. "I'm glad something I said has helped you."

"Please. Open it. Think of it as a birthday present or something, if you want."

"All right." She ripped the paper and opened the box. Her mouth went into an O of surprise. "Jim, this is so beautiful. You made it for me?" She turned the bookends over in her hands, touching the finish, feeling the joinwork where I'd fitted the pieces together and decorated them with delicate rosettes for her.

I nodded. "It's scrap wood from a bigger project, but I thought you might like it."

"Thank you." Maida was already clearing space on her desk for it, pulling reference books out of the plain metal bookends the department supplied and fitting them into the mahogany ones. "They're just wonderful." She ran her hands over them again. "You have a real talent for this, Jim. Did you ever think of going into the regional woodcarvers' show?"

I shook my head. "Didn't even know there was one."

"Well, you might consider it, if you keep doing work like this." Her eyes sparkled with pleasure. "What's the larger project, or can you tell me?"

"It's a surprise for Blair. I hope he'll like it."

"I'm sure he will." Maida looked me over with a critical eye. "You're sleeping better, I think. You look less tense, less haunted. I gather that things are working out."

"Slowly, but that's probably best."

She nodded. "As long as you're good with it. You've got my number if you want to talk."

"Right here," I patted my pocket where my wallet sat.

***

That week we had a burglary ring to deal with, not much problem. I couldn't believe anyone who was supposed to be a professional second-story man would be so stupid as to leave a glove behind, let alone one that had distinctive stitching on it, but it happened and that broke the case after two days.

On Wednesday, Sandburg talked a distraught man who'd taken his neighbors hostage into laying down his gun and coming out. Nobody got hurt. I had to turn my own hearing down on that one; he'd warned me ahead of time that he'd use command voice if he had to, and if I'd been listening I would've had to put my own weapon down, which would've landed me in more trouble than I wanted to think about.

We did paperwork on Thursday, and testified at a hearing on a previous case. No surprises there. On Friday, Simon got all of us together to go over some new guidelines from the state and the FBI on how certain kinds of situations were to be handled, such as kidnapings and hostage situations, and we bitched and moaned and decided together which things we'd do and which we'd quietly ignore. Sandburg was named as chief hostage negotiator, to nobody's surprise except his own.

Saturday night was the poker game, this time at Joel's. Sandburg leaned back in his chair so far I thought he'd go backwards, bluffed and schemed, and walked off with half the winnings. Simon and Rafe split most of the rest. It'd been a while since Blair had acted so much like his old self. I don't think anyone grudged his win, especially when he offered to pay for a round at Rooney's after work on a convenient day next week.

***

On Sunday I made sure to give Blair a short list of things we really needed to have for the loft, along with the usual breakfast food. I had to get him out of there for a while. He gave me this look that said, "I know you're up to something but I'm hungry so we'll discuss it over breakfast when I get back," and left.

I had half an hour. I needed longer, but it would do.

Five minutes to get into his room and pull all the books out of the bookcase I was replacing and stack them on his bed. Ten minutes to get the old bookcase out of the room, out of the apartment, into the elevator, down to the basement. Ten minutes to get the new bookcase up into the bare spot and haul the handtruck out of sight, and five more minutes to put all the books back.

It was damn close. He came in the door when I'd been sitting on the couch for only thirty seconds.

"Margarita says hi, Jim. She wants us to come over for dinner tonight." He dropped the bags on the island and started to put away food, light bulbs, and the other stuff I'd sent him after that we really didn't need yet.

"How's Francesca?'

"Bubbling away like usual. Not even a nightmare. You did good with her, Jim."

"I'm glad." I was more than glad. "I think that would be great, Chief. I'll give her a call after we eat." I couldn't sit still much longer. "Have you still got that Tom Clancy novel you borrowed from Joel? He said something about wanting to loan it to someone else. I looked around but it's not out here."

"Hey, I thought I gave it back to him last week."

I headed for the kitchen. "How about if I work on breakfast and you look for it in your room?"

"Okay." He darted into the small room.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

"Jim?"

I was at the door, watching him reach out and touch the swirling grain on the wood, the lines of the trim, the beveled glass doors that enclosed his most precious books, the Burton books, the years of Sentinel research and anthropological studies that had brought him into my life and made us who we were. "Thought it was time you had some good furniture of your own, not just my leftover office supplies."

"You made this."

I nodded, watching him. He looked younger than Francesca, full of wonder.

"For me."

I nodded again.

"I'm - " He ran his fingers lightly across the smoothly sanded shelves, the intricate carving at the top that had come to me as I worked. It was the face of the jaguar from the Temple of the Sentinels. I hadn't even known I'd remembered how it looked, but it came alive under my fingers. I'd given that one area a little stain, to darken it, and it glowed like ebony.

"It's yours."

"I don't know what to say." He turned to look at me and I could see tear tracks on his cheeks. Was it the lack of hair, or were his emotions just closer to the surface now? He couldn't hide anything any more; I could see it all, interpret it as if it were written in boldface the size of newspaper headlines.

Just as he could see mine, all of them, standing in front of him six feet high in ripple-grained mahogany and plate glass.

"It's so beautiful." Blair murmured, touching the doors with a careful hand. "Another first. Nobody's made me furniture before."

"So, you like it?"

"I love it, Jim. I haven't even got words to say thank you." His eyes came back to me again, still filled with something unsaid. "Is there an occasion I'm forgetting about? Obviously, I should remember it, I think."

"No occasion." I grinned at him, a little self-consciously. "I just didn't want to have to wait for an occasion to give it to you. I wanted you to have it now." I leaned against the doorframe, my arms crossed loosely, still watching him look at the carving on the wood and back at me again. "I don't tell you often enough how proud I am of you."

"Believe me, this goes a long way toward filling up that lack, if there is one." He ran his hands over the whole bookcase, inside and out, touching it, smelling the fragrance of the sealed wood, tracing the lines of carving and design, noticing the mitered corners and matched grain. "You know, if I saw this in a store it would be worth a year's pay and that still wouldn't be enough. It looks as if it was made by a master carpenter. I mean, look at the details. This isn't just a bookcase, Jim, it's a piece of art."

"It's just something I wanted to make for you," I said. I could feel a slight blush rising up my chest and throat. "You might say it was my homework from Maida."

His lips twisted a moment into a quirky grin. "She's great at those assignments, isn't she? Has she seen this?"

I shook my head. "I made bookends for her from some of the scrap. She said she liked them."

"When she comes over for dinner I'll have to show her. She said yes, by the way, she'd love to come over some time as long as it's just social."

"That's good."

He took a step toward me, and another, until he stood so close I could feel the heat of his skin through my light shirt. "I have to ask -"

"Chief, stay or go, it's yours. It's not meant to tie you to the loft, or to me."

"That wasn't the question." He struggled for a moment. "I need to know, Jim. What are you getting out of what we have? Is it enough?"

"I'm not sure what you're asking me." A lie.

How do you quantify emotion? In what units are friendship and affection and integrity and trust measured?

He moved a step closer, inside my space, carefully but not shyly. "I can't promise anything."

"I'm not asking for promises."

He nodded. I uncrossed my arms and let them hang loosely, unwilling to reach toward him unless he wanted me to.

"Jim -" A hand on my shoulder, coaxing my arm around him with no shudders in return. "It's almost too much of a gift. You. All of this."

"No." I held still, letting him decide. "Not too much for what you give me."

"Then let this be thank you, for now," he breathed. His hand went up behind my head, bringing my lips down a little to meet his.

It was care, tenderness, gratitude, gentle exploration, no force but the impetus of his bright personality, that flame that had burned to warm me for so long. Intoxicating, drawing me like a moth, but holding me safely back from fiery destruction.

Had he wished, he could have burned me as badly as Alex had burned in the Temple of the Sentinels, senses scorched beyond repair. Consciously or not, he knew this, knew me, well enough to draw back after a long eternity and end the contact with a gradual withdrawal of sensation, ending in a slow brush to the side and a gentle touch of his lips on my cheek.

I wrapped my other arm around him. Neither of us leaned on the other, but we both were sheltered in strong arms.

"I won't use you," he murmured to my throat. "I refuse to do that."

"I know." My lips were in his hair. "But you can't use me without my consent, and what I consent to isn't 'use.' If it's what you need, it's what you need. Taking care of the Guide."

"Part of the Sentinel-Guide link?" His voice shook a little. "Was this part of the job description?"

I nodded, and he shifted more closely in my arms, holding me tighter to himself. "Fine print. Footnote, in Burton, page 375 on the original manuscript."

Blair's head came up. "You read Burton?"

"Not the way you did, but yes. I looked through your copy a while back, did a little checking on the footnote."

"You're turning into an anthrogeek."

"Fair trade. You're a detective."

"That I am." Blair's eyes were bright, the noon sky on an August day. "I happen to know there's no footnote on page 375, because the last page is 368."

"You said once that his wife burned his letters when he died. She probably burned that too. Too sexually revealing. If page 375 had a footnote, that's what it would be, though." I was as sure of that as I was of his hands, one on my shoulder blade, one around my waist.

The smile I saw in his eyes transmuted into something deeper, a still pool in a forest of tall trees. "I can't be casual about this, Jim. I don't have answers; hell, I may not even have the right questions for a long time."

"So why should that be any different from the last five years? I'm not going anywhere, Chief." I murmured. "The answers will come. They always do, for you."

He had to find his own way, but I would be there for him all along the path. I'd come a long way past Rosie, beyond easy need and simple pleasures, beyond the shadows left by lightning. I could stay in this place a little bit longer, maybe forever.

"I'm not leaving either," Blair whispered. "I don't think I could, any more." His stomach rumbled once, loudly. "But I think feeding the Guide would be a good thing. How about apple pancakes?"


End file.
